Cultural
Legacy of the Communist Party USA
By John Earl Haynes
February 21, 2005

In dealing with deniers of the horrors of Stalinism,
frequently
represented on this list, as with the deniers of the horrors of Nazism,
there are two schools of thought: to ignore their claims or to confront
them. I’ve shifted my preference from time to time depending on the
circumstance.

As for the claim that accounts of Communist atrocities are
disinformation and lies let me specify one of particular relevance to
the history of the CPUSA (which took a direct role in covering it up and
does so to this day).

Stalin’s political police murdered not less than five hundred and
probably well in excess of one thousand North American Finns, chiefly
Finnish-Americans but a good number of Finnish-Canadians as well. Most

had been members of the CPUSA or the CPC or one of its
affiliates such
as the Finnish Workers Federation or the Finnish Organization of Canada.
These North American Red Finns had been drawn to the Soviet Union in the
early 1930s in a Soviet-backed drive to turn the Soviet republic of
Karelia into a "Red Finland" as an alternative to the
"White"
anti-Communist Republic of Finland next door.

Unfortunately, when the Great Terror came those persons with foreign
ties were particularly targeted. When aficionados of Esperanto and
philatelists (foreign stamps you know) were targeted for arrest and the
Gulag by Stalin’s police, the North American Finnish immigrants to
Karelia could hardly be ignored.

Among the victims were two well-known members of the American Communist
Party: Matti Tenhunen and Oscar Corgan. Tenhunen had led the Soviet
Karelian Technical Aid Committee that had arranged the emigration of
many from North America to Karelia and then joined the exodus himself.
For a time he served as head of the Karelian Council of People’s
Comissariats Labor Department and became editor of the Finnish-language
Punainen Karjala_ [Red Karelia]. He was arrested in 1937. In 1938 the
Communist International privately informed Canadian and American
Communists that the Soviet Karelian Technical Aid Committee had been
part of an anti-Soviet conspiracy out to "flood Soviet Karelia with all
sorts of undesirable bourgeois- nationalist, fascist and Trotskyist
agents; in short, under cover of a working class movement, these people
became the advance agents of fascism aiming at the destruction of
socialist economy in Soviet Karelia and its separation from the USSR."
The Comintern stated, "At his trial for diversionist activities . . .
[Matti Tenhunen] was fully exposed as an agent of the Finnish police and
sentenced to a term of imprisonment by the Soviet Courts." Actually, the
KGB murdered Tenhunen on December 28, 1937, shortly after his arrest,
and the charges against him were totally false.

Oscar Corgan became head of the Soviet Karelian Technical Aid Committee
in the United States after Tenhunen’s departure for Karelia, and then he
too emigrated along with his wife and three American-born children.
Corgan, who had once managed the CPUSA’s _Työmies_ newspaper in
Superior, Wisconsin, went to work for a Finnish-language Karelian
publishing house. He was arrested on November 4, 1937, and his family
was later told that he had received a fifteen-year prison sentence. He
never returned from the labor camps, however. In 1956, after
Khrushchev’s de-Stalinization campaign began, the family received a
death certificate showing that Corgan had died of "stomach cancer" in
1940. In 1991, under the Gorbachev reforms, they received a corrected
certificate showing that he had been executed two months after his arrest.

In 1997 a Russian organization dedicated to exposing Stalin- era crimes,
Memorial, located a KGB burial site near Sandarmokh, one of four it has
found in Karelia. The site contains more than nine thousand bodies in
approximately three hundred separate burial trenches. The position of
the skeletons and other remains suggested that the prisoners had been
stripped to their underwear, lined up next to a trench with hands and
feet tied, and shot in the back of the head with a pistol. Documents in
a regional KGB archive identify about four thousand of the victims as
Gulag prison laborers used to build the Belomar canal connecting the
Baltic to the White Sea, one thousand as prisoners from the Gulag camp
at Solovetskiye, and about three thousand as victims of the Karelian
purge. More than six thousand of the dead are listed by name.

Among the victims named are 141 Finnish Americans and 127 Finnish
Canadians. They include the two chief organizers of the emigration,
Oscar Corgan and Matti Tenhunen. But the list also includes ordinary
American workers such as Eino Bjorn, born in Minnesota and shot on
February 10, 1938, at age twenty- six; Walter Maki, another Minnesota
native who was shot on May 15, 1938; John Siren, born in Duluth,
Minnesota, shot on February 11, 1938; Mathew Kaartinen, born in
Ironwood, Michigan, and shot by the KGB on December 28, 1937; Andrew
Hannula, born in the state of Washington and shot on December 28, 1937;
and Enoch Nelson, born in San Francisco and shot on March 5, 1938.
Fourteen of the dead were native-born Americans. The rest were
immigrants to the United States early in the twentieth century who had
then joined the Communist-sponsored emigration to Karelia in the early
1930s. It is unknown how many of the latter were naturalized American
citizens. By occupation, the largest group among those murdered by the
KGB was loggers, followed by truck drivers and mechanics, then a variety
of skilled tradesmen, some factory workers, a few professionals, several
actors and musicians, and one hairdresser. Most of the executed were
adult males but the list of the dead includes one husband and wife
(Niilo and Elvira Filpus of Detroit, Michigan) executed together on
January 21, 1938.

Helen Hill, born in Minnesota in 1917, is also listed. Her parents took
her to Karelia in 1932 when she was a teenager. She was working as a
dispatcher at a lumber camp when she was arrested. A KGB executioner put
a pistol to the back of her head and blew her brains out on April 22,
1938, before she was twenty- three years old. According to the KGB her
offense was that she "maintained contacts with relatives in the U.S.
Collected information in favor of Finland’s intelligence service.
Praised life in capitalist countries. Spoke of her intentions to cross
the border creating a spirit of emigration in the workers."

Below is a list of the names, biographical data, and dates of execution
of 141 Finnish Americans executed and buried in a secret KGB mass grave
at Sandarmokh in the Karelian Republic of the Russian Federation.
Fourteen victims were American citizens by birth. It is unknown how many
of the others, who immigrated to the United States early in the
twentieth century, were naturalized citizens at the time of their move
from the United States to the Soviet Union in the early 1930s.

I have no doubt that the ideologically blind and strong-stomached
admirers of communism can read this list with a disdain and contempt or
find some verbal formulation to justify averting their eyes. I ask
others, however, to read the list and consider its meaning.

Nahkala Juho Fedorovich (Heikki) born 1884, Finland; emigrated from the
USA in 1931; metal worker at a paper mill; executed 22 April 1938.

Nelson (Poukkula), Enoch Jakovlevich (Jaakko) born 1897, San Francisco,
California; emigrated from the USA in 1921;member of the Soviet
Communist Party (VKP/b); director of industrial enterprise, Uhtua;
executed 5 March 1938.

Niemi, Andrei Ioganovitsh (Antti Johannesovich) born 1886, Finland;
emigrated from New York in 1931; carpenter, city hall, Petrozavodsk;
executed 6 March 1938.

Tenhunen, Matti Petrovich (Pekka) born 1883, Finland; emigrated from the
USA in 1931; head of the Karelian Council of People’s Comissariats Labor
Department; publishing house director; executed 28 December 1937.

Ylitalo, Jaakko Gustavovich (Kustaa) born 1898, Finland; emigrated from
the USA in 1926 to "Sower" commune, Rostov oblast, from there to
Karelia; stove mason, state farm N 2; executed 10 February 1938.

This list is based on Mayme Sevander’s research in archives in
Petrozavodsk, Russia as well as the work of Jukka Pietilainen and Carl
Ross on similar list from the Finnish language journal _Carelia_ (issues
2-9, 1998) published in Petrozavodsk. The names in KGB archives are in
Russian and follow Russian naming conventions which include patronymics.
The latter, however, were not customary among North American Finns. To
preserve the authenticity of KGB documents the Russian patronymics have
been preserved, while the Finnish/English spelling is given in
parentheses. Russian patronymics have double markers: OVA/EVA,
indicating the possessive case; and ICH -- masculine, NA -- feminine.
Thus, Ivanovich -- son of Ivan; Ivanovna -- daughter of Ivan. In
addition to KGB and other archival records, Sevander made use of Yuri
Dmitriev, _Mesto Rasstrela Sandarmokh_ [Sandarmokh Is Where They Were
Executed] (Petrozavodsk [Russia], 1999); Eila Lahti-Argutina, _Olimme
Joukko Vieras Vaan_ [We Were Just a Bunch of Strangers] (Turku
[Finland]: Siirtolaisuusinstituutti, 2001) and Mayme Sevander,
_Vaeltajat_ [Wanderers]

This list can be found as an appendix to Haynes and Klehr’s _In Denial:
Historians, Communism and Espionage_.